A few months ago, we started the setup on a new SEO campaign for Jelly Beans, an Australian jelly sandals company who wanted to take on the highly competitive USA shoe market.
Not only was their US domain Jbeans.co nowhere to be seen in America’s Google.com, they were going to have to compete with some of USA’s biggest online retailers, like Zappos – America’s largest online shoe (and clothing) store who completely dominated the search engine rankings.
Despite all this, after a mere 6 months, we took Jelly Beans from not having a single ranking on page 1 of Google.com (out of the 100 keywords in their strategy), to having:
- 26 #1 rankings
- 39 keywords ranking in positions 1-3 (‘hyper-traffic’)
- 65 keywords ranking on page 1 of Google.com
- 589.82% increase in organic traffic
- #1 market share holder in the industry
So how did we do it?
Getting down to basics
It is always important to have clear understanding of how a site currently operates before incorporating any SEO tactics and campaigns.
Prior to starting the campaign for Jelly Beans, the site only had one product page where all products could be purchased from. While it was very user friendly and had a high conversion rate, it could not be properly optimised for product relevant keywords.
We restructured the site so that each product had its own, properly optimised page. We also created a blog section and resolved any SEO issues that were occurring related to Jbeans.co being part of a Magento multi-site.
Ongoing Competitor Monitoring and Analysis
Competitor monitoring and analysis is a vital element in every SEO campaign, this is especially crucial when a heavy-weight competitor like Zappos, who completely dominates the organic search market share is part of your industry, clearly they’re doing something right! (And if they’re not, they will most likely come crashing down).
During both the initial SEO setup and analysis stage and over the consecutive months of the campaign, our SEO team became stalkers. We watched Zappos’ every move like a hawk. We studied their technical and content SEO strategies as well as their off page footprint and then adapted that knowledge to fit Jelly Beans’ SEO campaign plan. It paid off.
Creating shareable content
Content marketing and creating shareable content is becoming more and more vital especially when you’re a start-up company aiming to outrank the big guns. The US fashion industry is a prime example of content creation being key in optimising your site, more still when you are competing against Zappos who are continuously developing their content marketing strategy.
We created fresh, funny and unique content that was based on keywords and ideas that the target market were searching for or had concerns about. Then, we made it easy for this content to be shared.
Long-term strategy
While many SEOs still use poor short-term techniques that get companies ranking quickly but come down with a crash, we pride ourselves on developing and executing SEO campaigns that are built to last. This campaign was no different.
We only used strategies that would allow Jelly Beans to get to the top and stay there.